WILKES-BARRE, Pa — Accused killer Harlow Raymond Cuadra couldn’t sleep for a week after the killing of Back Mountain porn producer Bryan Kocis.
But the murder “made me feel better inside,” Cuadra says in a 108-page transcript of a wire tap of Cuadra and his accused accomplice Joseph Kerekes on a San Diego beach.
Luzerne County Assistant District Attorneys Tim Doherty and Michael Melnick filed the document Tuesday at the county courthouse.
Cuadra and Kerekes discuss their fledgling adult film business, making adult films with Sean Lockhart and how Kocis’ murder negatively affected their business in the transcript.
Lockhart, along with adult film producer Grant Roy, worked with police to set up the wire tap on April 28. Kerekes and Cuadra killed Kocis to lure Lockhart from Kocis’ Cobra Video to their business, prosecutors claim.
Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty against the two men, who they claim conspired to kill Kocis and then set fire to his house.
A pre-trial hearing in the case is scheduled for Jan. 30 before Luzerne County Judge Peter Paul Olszewski Jr.
In the transcript, Cuadra talks about how to get rid of Kocis’ business and how paperwork related to it likely burned in the fire.
“Well, if you guys wanna take care of Cobra for once and for all,” Cuadra said. “I don’t think there’s a real hurry on it, unless he had a copy of all that paperwork at his lawyer’s office, it’s all gone.”
Cuadra and Kerekes tell Lockhart and Roy about several of Kocis’ possessions during the transcript, from computers to video equipment.
“That’s misinformation …,” Cuadra said in the transcript. “(Kocis) took everything and showed it to me for proof and … I got rid of all of that (stuff) too, it’s all disintegrated, it’s all gone computers, everything.”
Cuadra and Kerekes also repeatedly discussed in the transcript media reports about the murder and what they saw at Kocis’ house. Cuadra said he did “recon” of the place. He dismissed the idea that Kocis would have had to “know his killer” and let him in. He described the front door and said it didn’t have a “peephole” but there were “two square blocks of windows on top and Bryan’s not tall enough to see through that.”